ODTUG 2010

I am waiting in the National Airport in DC for my flight back to Atlanta after being just a vendor at ODTUG. Neither of the papers I submitted made the cut this year, so I was relegated to booth duty alone. There were around 1000 attendees from what I could garner from various folks, so it was an average year. We had good traffic to the booth, not great mind you, but several folks who seemed interested a day.

On Wednesday night they had a stand-up comic. I felt kind of sorry for him as his jokes were more miss than hit. I am afraid that getting comics for tech conferences tends to be a risky venture. Let me tell you why I think that is the case.

Most comics are aiming their humor at the average person. Unfortunately the average person has an IQ around 100 or less and is generally pretty near the stereotype for their gender. From what I have observed most techies (at least in the Oracle field) tend to be well above average intelligence (110-120 IQ) and are not stereotypical. Most women I have met in the Oracle field are driven, goal oriented and usually not vain, object driven clothes horses. Most men in the Oracle world seem to be more “metrosexual” in their way of life, cooking, cleaning and generally not being slobs with little focus outside of jobs, sports and other male dominated pursuits. Given this misqueue between what most comics are setting their humor for and what the average Oracle nerd really is like you can see why much of the stereotype driven humor falls on deaf ears.

Anyway, overall the conference seemed successful with most people I asked saying they enjoyed the talks and got value from the presentations, even if the show on Wednesday left many of us not laughing.